“Guattari has suggested that to consider a living system only as a closed, autopoietic unity of inputs and outputs cut off from the developmental events of its entire genetic phylum would fail to account for its liveliness (1995: 39). And for Maturana and Varela ecosystemically autopoiesis is always organized and organizing in relation to both other autopoietic processes and a greater ecology of interactions (1988: 43 – 50). Autopoiesis entails collective activity and collectives always comprise a diverse ensemble of human, nonhuman, institutional, and technical agents. Niklas Luhmann also noted that a more generalized systems approach to autopoiesis might see nonliving systems using a general “ system-building ” principle of “ self-referential closure ” (2008: 84). Once we understand generative processes transversally, the distinction breaks down between technical systems as allopoietic (producing something apart from themselves; a factory producing a silicon chip, for instance) and living systems as autopoietic: “ Institutions and technical machines appear to be allopoietic, but when one considers them in the context of the machinic assemblages they constitute with human beings, they become ipso facto autopoietic. Thus we will view autopoiesis from the perspective of the ontogenesis and phlyogenesis proper to a mecanosphere superposed on the biosphere” (Guattari, 1995: 40).

It is at this level of a reinvigorated analysis of networked ecology that we need to apprehend the conjunctions and edges of Google ’ s world making. Both Google’s making, that is, of a searchable world and its cloaking of that world in data. To do this, we must come at Google from both ends — on the one hand from the viewpoint of what Guattari calls a generalized ecology, “ to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the mecanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference” (Guattari, 2008: 29); and on the other hand from the molecular, diagrammatic perspective of microecologies. The former will search out the conjunctions between Google and other abstract machines, asking whether these conjunctions lead to a hardening or cracking of the seamless surface of googlization. The latter will involve feeling out how and where, as with Autoscopia , the relations between search engine and the cartographic loosen up, releasing new energies and conjunctions that allow for a new diagram of networks.”